About Me

My name is Jan Polet.

Originally being an audio engineer who worked at several Dutch local radio stations for more than ten years as an engineer, DJ and audio imager, in 1996 I founded an ICT company called Help at Hand because of the lack of companies offering their ICT services to small businesses and private persons.
Hence the name Help at Hand.

After ten years of focusing on designing and maintaining networks and everything that that entails, and also doing lots of graphic work like basic layouts of brochures, flyers, signs, letterheads, cards, adds, PDFs, etc, working with music and audio slowly found its way back into my work.

Creating the Hit Test, a segment featured on Adam Curry’s podcast named ‘The Daily Source Code’ for about a year in 2005, resulted in several new things. In 2007 the Hit Test returned to The Daily Source Code as a weekly segment, and reached its 150th epsisode in December of 2008.

Although the graphics work remains, Help at Hand started to focuses on audio imaging like voice overs, sweepers, beds, custom made music, complete packages, but also on producing formats, podcasts, audio newsletters and music. Others things like mixing, mastering and teaching basic audio and sound processing, everything you need to know to work with audio in a (radio) studio, also became part of the new media activities.

Also because of the fact that I’m visually impaired, audio is a very important part of my life. The lack of visual information forces me to rely much more on my memory. Because I can’t read the covers, selecting music for radio shows was done by skipping through CD’s and only listening to a few seconds of each song, which evolved into a game played with fellow DJ’s and that wass kind of the basis of The Hit Test.

Next to all the technical en media things I had been doing, I became a developmentally oriented coach.

At the moment video is an important part of what I do. Due to my eye sight issues I seem to have a different kind of overview of things in terms of filming. Together with my other skills, that seems to enable me to approach things in a different way.

I’ve always been good with equipment. Audio, photo, video, it really doesn’t matter.
I love the whole process of planning, filming and editing and everything that comes with it. Which is more in most cases than people realize.
Getting it just right. Both technically and in terms of content and authenticity.